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I was going to review ARK: Survival Evolved, which is the new survival game involving dinosaurs, still in early access. It looks awesome and I’ve seen some funny playthroughs, but unfortunately on my computer, it plays at 1 frame per second. And this is after it takes half an hour to start up.

I made it to the character creation screen, which is really detailed and gives you quite a lot of freedom with body type and skin color. Unfortunately, if you try to click and drag the character to a different position, it takes a second to respond, and then goes too far, so you go from full frontal view, to a nice view of your character’s scalp, to an up close and personal view of your character’s lovingly crafted crotch folds.

I’m fully aware that my three-year-old laptop is just not powerful enough for this game, but considering that I can run most games, and that this was all the way down to its absolute lowest graphic settings, I feel like maybe their requirements are excessive. Or maybe I just need a new computer.

Still, I’m sad that Maddy Longlegs is never going to see the light of day.

Let’s try to look at this week’s gaming news without dying a little inside.

Zoe Quinn, the game developer for Depression Quest, was targeted by a vicious harassment campaign headed by her ex-boyfriend. The boyfriend started a blog about her, accusing her of cheating. This ballooned into him and his 4chan army posting nude photos and YouTube videos with personal information including her home address, sending her death threats and rape threats, and on and on. In order to pretend this campaign was anything other than some douche whining about his ex, 4chan accused her of sleeping with a journalist at Kotaku in order to get a favorable review of Depression Quest. Since the journalist in question never reviewed Depression Quest, that excuse quickly fell flat.

Meanwhile, Anita Sarkeesian released the next episode in her series, Tropes vs Women in Video Games. This episode was part 2 of Women as Background Decoration, and pointed out the many, many, (many, many, many) games where women are used as sexy props, or murdered in sexualized ways, or raped just to make a game seem gritty. This, like all of her other videos, was meticulously researched and impeccably presented, which naturally resulted in a surge of misogynistic frothing and wailing. At this point it’s coming routine.

I would like to announce that Polytron and the Fez IP are now for sale. No reasonable offer will be turned down. I am done. I want out. RUN AWAY. Just don’t do it. Give up your dreams. They are actually nightmares. Nothing is worth this. To every aspiring game developer out there: Don’t. give up. It’s not worth it. This is your audience. This is videogames.

Dan Golding’s article The End of Gamers suggests that these events–or at least, the ones involving Anita and Zoe–mark the end of gamers. ‘Gamer’ in this case refers to members of the community of video game players whose identity is constructed around the idea of being “outsiders.” It’s a demographic that has been targeted by video game designers in the past, but now that more adult women play video games than teenage boys, the market is going to change. For guys who are beginning to realize they’re no longer the target demographic, that’s scary, and they’re reacting with psychotic violence in a futile attempt to stop it.

“It was on our feature list until not too long ago, but it’s a question of focus and production,” Therien explained. “So we wanted to make sure we had the best experience for the character. A female character means that you have to redo a lot of animation, a lot of costumes [inaudible]. It would have doubled the work on those things. And I mean it’s something the team really wanted, but we had to make a decision… It’s unfortunate, but it’s a reality of game development.”

So you can’t add a female protagonist because wow, that perky bum is hard to do just right. And the hair! I mean, looking at the vast amount of exposed skin on the male characters, I can see why a female character would be drastically different:

You’d have to cut a boob window into that cloak, for one. They had nine studios working on this game, and that was just for the male characters. Imagine how many more they’d need to add to get some realistic breast physics in there.

You know, I feel like I heard this whole argument recently. When was that? Oh, right.

“Historically speaking, animating female characters are really, really difficult, because they have to go through these range of emotions, but you have to keep them pretty and they’re very sensitive to — you can get them off a model very quickly. So, having a film with two hero female characters was really tough, and having them both in the scene and look very different if they’re echoing the same expression; that Elsa looking angry looks different from Anna being angry.”

So what is it that makes men easier to animate? Is it because males are not supposed to be emotional, so you can plaster on an expression of grim determination and be done with it? Is it because it’s a lot easier to reuse the same character design from the last game and not bother thinking up a new one? Or does it just come down to the tired old argument that women don’t play video games and men won’t play games with female protagonists?